Business and Trade Committee
Oral evidence: Post Office and Horizon – Compensation follow-up, HC 477
Tuesday 16 January 2024
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 16 January 2024.
Business and Trade Committee members present: Liam Byrne (Chair); Douglas Chapman; Jonathan Gullis; Antony Higginbotham; Ian Lavery; Anthony Mangnall; Julie Marson; Charlotte Nichols; Mark Pawsey.
Justice Committee member present: Sir Robert Neill.
Questions 226 - 266
Witnesses
IV: Kevin Hollinrake MP, Minister for Enterprise, Markets and Small Business; Carl Creswell, Director, Business Resilience, Department for Business and Trade.
Examination of witnesses
Witnesses: Kevin Hollinrake MP and Carl Creswell.
Q226 Chair: Welcome to the fourth evidence session of the Business and Trade Committee looking at Post Office compensation. Minister, I am very grateful to you and to your officials for spending time with us this morning and for your patience as the panels have overrun. I am sure you agree that it was important for us to get some of that evidence on the record. Could you tell us briefly what your goal for the legislation is, whether it will be a Bill sponsored by your Department and when you expect us to have the Bill introduced?
Kevin Hollinrake: Thank you, Chair. I very much welcome the sessions you have held today; they have been very informative. What we have always tried to do, ever since I have been in post—for the last 15 months or so—is to get compensation out the door as quickly as possible.
Chair: It is not going very well, is it?
Kevin Hollinrake: We will come to that. We have also tried to make sure that it is as fair as possible and to hold people to account.
In terms of your question about what we hope to achieve with this, we know that, of the 983 convictions, only 95 have been overturned, and we cannot get money to people with convictions unless we overturn their convictions. Our intention, setting the scope as widely as possible, is to overturn all those convictions, without those postmasters having to come forward, so that all those people can access compensation quickly and easily. That is what we are trying to achieve.
We expect our Department to be the Department looking after the legislation, and we expect that to be within weeks. That is challenging, as you have heard and as you have said yourselves, in terms of evidence today. This situation is unprecedented; nobody has tried to do this before, so it is not straightforward in terms of how we scope and draft the legislation, but that is a challenge we feel we can meet and meet within weeks. That is the commitment we have made.
Q227 Chair: Will you undertake to introduce a draft Bill, so that it can go through a very short, sharp process of pre-legislative scrutiny?
Kevin Hollinrake: I do not have any objection to that. It is something that Bob Neill has asked me to do already in terms of looking at this to make sure it is fit for purpose. We want that to be the case, and we are very keen to work both cross-Government and cross-party in trying to make sure that we get this right first time.
Q228 Chair: On the timetable, you will have heard the frankly appalling stories from Jo Hamilton and Alan Bates today about how long compensation is still taking to be paid and the way they feel they are being re-tried. I have asked you twice on the Floor of the House when you will get all of the compensation paid, and on both occasions you have answered that it will be by the end of August. When No. 10 briefed last week, however, they said by the end of the year. So can we get a definitive answer today: when will all of those who need redress have that redress?
Kevin Hollinrake: I very much hope that it will be by August. Not all the situation is within our gift; not all the different moving parts are within our gift. That is the difficulty with this.
I think there was some confusion about what has been paid already. Can we just be clear about this? There were 2,417 claims to the Horizon shortfall scheme. Over 2,000 of those have been settled. In total, 2,700 cases have been settled—64% of all claimants.
As you have heard, there are three different compensation schemes. There is HSS, which was the first scheme to be established. There is the GLO scheme—the group litigation order scheme. And there is the overturned conviction scheme. All have different moving parts, and not every one of those moving parts do we have control over. But we are keen to expedite it wherever possible, and one of the ways we have done that, of course, in recent weeks and recent months is to bring forward what we have said is the fixed-sum award, or the up-front payments—however you want to describe that—
Q229 Chair: You heard Jo Hamilton’s reaction to that.
Kevin Hollinrake: I did, and we are not saying—we would never say—that the fixed-sum award is the right solution for everybody, but it is a solution to many cases. Earlier, Neil Hudgell said that, of the 31 cases that have been settled, and overturned convictions, 28 of them, I think, have been settled by fixed-sum awards. For some people with lower-level claims, it is a £600,000 level on the overturned convictions and £75,000 in the group litigation order. That is not a maximum payment; that is a payment for people we expect with lower-level claims. People can simply exit the process, which has two benefits. One is that it draws a line under the issue for those people. Don’t get me wrong: as Jo Hamilton said, no amount of compensation can ever make good completely what has happened in the past, but compensation is important. But some people can draw a line under this by seeking compensation quickly and easily and move out of the process. That is good for them personally but, clearly, also good for the remaining people, because it shortens the queue for other people. It has the added benefit of doing that.
Q230 Chair: Just help me understand: why is No. 10 briefing the end of the year, when you have been really clear with the Committee today, and with the House twice, that the deadline, in your mind, is the end of August?
Kevin Hollinrake: It is not a deadline, Chair; it is an ambition for when we want to deliver this scheme by. We have to frame the legislation and then we have to persuade people to come forward for compensation. Those people may choose either of the two routes: full assessment or fixed-sum award. If people choose a fixed-sum award, it is much, much quicker—literally a couple of weeks is what it is taking. If it is full assessment, that is a very significant and complicated process.
This is not just about this scheme. I was involved in the Lloyds HBOS compensation scheme. Despite everybody’s best efforts and a retired High Court judge being in charge of that process, in the end we had exactly the same problems, which is why we brought forward a fixed-sum award in that scheme, too. That was very successful, so it is something that will help. It is not the solution for everybody, but it will help.
Q231 Chair: Let me pin down one key question. If someone is in the 555 group and has not been convicted, what is your goal for seeing them secure full redress?
Kevin Hollinrake: 7 August. That was always the date. There was a date because of how the relationship between compensation and the Treasury rules specified it, but that is the date we want to deliver it by. As I say, we cannot be in charge of this whole process. Negotiations happen. There are lawyers on either side of the equation, so it can take time to negotiate those deals.
Q232 Chair: What is your confidence level that the unconvicted in the 555 group will have full redress by August?
Kevin Hollinrake: With a fair wind, I have very high confidence levels. We have made a commitment that we will respond within 40 working days to 90% of all submitted claims. I will give you some numbers on the performance so far, and I will be very happy to hand over to Carl.
Q233 Chair: While you do that, could you give us the numbers of people in the 555 group who were convicted and those who were non-convicted? As a Committee, we have struggled to put that information together from public sources.
Kevin Hollinrake: I think 63 were convicted.
Carl Creswell: That is correct. Sixty-three of the 555 had convictions; 47 of the 555 have had compensation through the arrangements that the Post Office are leading to compensate those with overturned convictions. So far, £17 million has gone to that group of 47 people, and there is more to come.
Chair: So we have a long way still to go.
Q234 Mark Pawsey: Minister, thank you for spending your time with us this morning listening to all the evidence. It is very valuable to have you here.
When Mr Bates was asked why this has taken 20 years, he said it was because the Post Office had the ear of politicians. Is he right?
Kevin Hollinrake: You would have to ask the various politicians. I work with the Post Office very closely; I meet Nick Read on a regular basis. Are we challenging in our relationship with the Post Office? Absolutely, and I expect any of my predecessors did that too.
Q235 Mark Pawsey: But did we, over the past 20 years?
Kevin Hollinrake: I do not think we have been sufficiently challenging, no: this would not have happened, or it would have been resolved earlier, if we had been more challenging earlier. But we all make mistakes, Mark. These are challenging things to do. I am not going to blame any of my predecessors specifically, but clearly we could have done better.
Q236 Mark Pawsey: We know that in any group of people, postmasters included, there will be some who have done some wrong. There will have been a number of cases that had to come on a regular basis, but these were multiplied. We heard from Mr Read that at no point did anybody in the Post Office question why the numbers of postmasters being convicted had suddenly started to increase. Why do you think that was unchallenged for so long?
Kevin Hollinrake: There is an interesting graph. There is some legal research on it that I can share with you. There were about five prosecutions a year prior to 1999. The number suddenly shot up on the introduction of Horizon to an average of something like 55 and stayed there until the JFSA court case brought it forward.
Q237 Mark Pawsey: We both have a voice. If we saw something of that nature happening, it would trigger a question.
Kevin Hollinrake: Yes, definitely. We can all speculate about what happened in the Post Office at the time, but my guesstimate would be that people thought, “Isn’t this system great? We are suddenly identifying all these people who are stealing money off us.” I think that that would have been understandable at the time, but as the evidence came in or the outcry became louder from Alan Bates, Jo Hamilton and others, the questions should have been asked and answered.
Q238 Mark Pawsey: Do you accept that there was a pretty unequal relationship between the postmaster and the Post Office? We heard about this big, trusted brand that could do no wrong, but there were huge resources behind the Post Office, and the postmasters were the little people. How can we prevent that kind of relationship from occurring in any organisation in which the Government is involved in future?
Kevin Hollinrake: I think this happens right across the piece. I do not have all the answers, but it is something we need to look at very carefully. I think there was inequality of arms between postmasters and Post Office and there was inequality of arms in the legal process and the courts. There is evidence of this: Paul Marshall, an important barrister who has worked in this area, identified that courts often side with the larger entity rather than with the person who is trying to defend themselves. There are questions to answer right across the piece.
Q239 Mark Pawsey: I want to ask a few questions about the legislation you are bringing forward, which we know is urgently needed. First, among the sub-postmasters will be some who have done wrong and should have been convicted. Under your proposed new legislation, how will you make certain that those who did do something wrong are not unnecessarily exonerated and do not receive some compensation inappropriately from the taxpayer?
Kevin Hollinrake: That is where we want to be, but we have been clear on this: there is a significant chance that some people who are actually guilty of something will get compensation. I think we should be honest about that.
Mark Pawsey: It is a risk that we need to take.
Kevin Hollinrake: It is a risk that we need to take—as we have said before, the lesser of two evils. As Jo Hamilton said in her evidence, it is the only way. It is imperfect, but the reality is, yes, we will try to put mitigations in place; we are very happy to hear from the Committee about different mitigations that we could put in place. We have committed to having a statement that people have to sign to say that they were not guilty of theft or the things that they may have been accused and found guilty of, but that is imperfect.
Q240 Mark Pawsey: What would you say to those who have said to us that overturning a conviction without a full process devalues the acquittal of those who went through the courts? Do you accept that?
Kevin Hollinrake: Again, Jo Hamilton said that she did not feel that her case and what she did would be devalued. It is an incredible story, and it was a pleasure to meet Jo some weeks ago. I hope that people do not feel that. I don’t think that is right; if anything, I think the admiration for people who have gone through this has skyrocketed, given the dramatisation, so I do not feel that is the case. People can see that there is this massive, widespread miscarriage of justice. It is not just the scale of it; it is the depth of it. It is the scale of it in terms of the number of people, but also the depth of it in terms of the impact on people’s lives. That is what really came through in that dramatisation.
Q241 Mark Pawsey: We acknowledge that you are moving as fast as you can, but what do you make of the Scottish First Minister’s announcement that overturning convictions for Post Office scandal victims in Scotland will happen immediately?
Kevin Hollinrake: I welcome it. We are very keen to work with our counterparts in the different jurisdictions—Northern Ireland as well—to make sure that we do this on a UK-wide basis and are consistent.
Q242 Mark Pawsey: How can the Government make sure that the criminal records of those who were convicted are expunged as quickly as possible?
Kevin Hollinrake: That is what we have to draft the legislation to do, and it is complex. We had meetings on it yesterday and we will have more meetings. I spoke to the Justice Secretary about it last night. It is not straightforward, but no doubt we will get the views of some eminent people on this Committee on how we do that. We are keen to do it as quickly as possible.
Q243 Sir Robert Neill: Minister, I welcome the fact that you are willing to consult widely as to how best we achieve that. My Committee is happy to help. But may we get one thing clear? It is an exceptional step, isn’t it, to deal with a wholly exceptional circumstance?
Kevin Hollinrake: Yes.
Q244 Sir Robert Neill: Will the Government make it clear, however the registration is framed and presented, that this is not and could never be used as a precedent for undermining the basic principle of the independence of the judiciary when they are considering both criminal and civil cases? That is fundamental, isn’t it?
Kevin Hollinrake: Absolutely. You have that commitment from me. Tell us anything you think we need to do to set that out—the reasons why we are doing this, the fact that this is suboptimal, the fact that this route we are taking is the least worst option, or any way we can define this to exclude the possibility of having to do this again, to interfere with the judicial process. I am all ears and very keen to work with you to do that.
Q245 Sir Robert Neill: Would it also be fair to say that the decision to proceed by this exceptional route does not imply any criticism of the judiciary or the way they handled matters on the information available to them at the time?
Kevin Hollinrake: Absolutely. Not at all, although it does illustrate the inequality of arms, as I said, in court-based processes. We saw that in the dramatization, and in the real world that is exactly what did happen. But yes: no criticism whatever.
Chair: We used to have a great system called legal aid.
Q246 Ian Lavery: With regard to compensation, Minister, we have heard this morning—I think you have been here for most of the session—that there is a massive issue that seems to be outstanding and perhaps ignored: the fact that sub-postmasters and the sub-post offices are like a family business. We are looking at compensation for the victims only, but women have been widowed and children have lost their father or mother as a result of this. People have been separated, never to see each other again. Kids have had to move communities. What will the Government do to make sure that fair and rightful compensation is given to people other than the victims who were part of the sub-postmasters’ families, as it were?
Kevin Hollinrake: It is heartbreaking. In my constituency, Sam Harrison, who was the postmaster at Nawton, near Helmsley, sadly passed away last May. She was part of the 555. I have spoken to one of her sons. Those are heartbreaking situations: what they have been through, as well as the fact that they have now lost their mum. Compensation will be paid to the family—to their estate—and will flow through to those individuals that way.
I think that there are two questions right here. We are talking to the advisory board about this, and that has been absolutely vital in getting to where we are today. The advisory board does a fantastic job. It covers all three schemes and includes Lord Arbuthnot, Kevan Jones, Richard Moorhead and Chris Hodges, the chair. They have talked about the impact on family members; that is something that we have been talking about.
I will be honest—I always seek to be honest with this Committee—that there is a nervousness around directly compensating family members. You could say that for any compensation scheme we run, whether it relates to contaminated blood or some of the banking scandals and all those things. All of those families are affected, of course, but it would hugely increase the scope and complexity of compensation schemes, and of course the cost of the compensation schemes. It would not be an easy thing to do to open it up to family members, but I understand the point that you are making.
Q247 Anthony Mangnall: Minister, thank you for sitting through and for being here. Can I ask the question that I ended with in the session with Lord Arbuthnot: why are we still using Horizon?
Kevin Hollinrake: Again, that is the least worst option. This is one of the biggest IT networks in Europe, if not the world, so it is a significant thing to replace. I think that the cost of replacing it, so far, is around £270 million. It is being rebuilt in order to get people off Horizon as soon as possible.
As far as we are aware, however, the system that they are using now is far more reliable than previous versions. Some of the difficulties have been resolved, I think, and all the difficulties that caused the problems in the past have been resolved. It is something that the Post Office wants to move away from. We are funding that; we are helping the Post Office with funding to be able to do that.
Q248 Anthony Mangnall: Can I just push you on that? This is what everyone said at the beginning: “Here is the biggest and best system in Europe,” I think it was said, and “Isn’t it fantastic? We are going to make it easier for those who work in the Post Office.” And look at where we are now: the people who messed up the system—that is putting it politely—are still running the operating system that those who work in the Post Office are using.
It all comes back to trust and confidence in the system. You cannot be that confident that the people working in the Post Office at the moment are confident and trust the system they are using. Indeed, even in the run-up to this inquiry, a number of us went out and spoke to sub-postmasters and mistresses across the country. Out of the 10 or 15 I spoke to, both past and present, I don’t think I spoke to a single one who had any confidence in that system.
We have been here before. We have heard about IBM and we have heard about Amazon; these new systems and the new organisations that are going to try to run them are all falling through the cracks and are not being implemented. Why are we not expediting that? Twenty-five years should be enough time to change the system altogether.
Kevin Hollinrake: That is the reason why it is being rebuilt: we are moving off it. As you know, IT projects are notoriously slower and more costly than expected, and this is no different. You can’t just rip a system out overnight. You have to rebuild it, it has to be right, it has to be fit for purpose, and you have to make sure it doesn’t carry the same flaws as previous versions. We are a lot further on in terms of IT capability and the deployment of these kinds of technologies than we were 25 years ago, so there is every reason to expect that it will be a much more robust system. It is currently being piloted in a number of branches, but these things take time.
Q249 Anthony Mangnall: What safeguards do you think you can or ought to provide for someone who does not have confidence in the system they are currently using, for historical reasons? Rather than the Horizon helpline, should your Department have a dedicated helpline so people can contact you if they are not confident in the response they are getting and their relationship with the organisation running their operating system?
Kevin Hollinrake: I think we have to be careful not to end up running the Post Office. That is not what we do. It is not what we want to do and not what we have the expertise to do. You have to have confidence in the management to do that; that is their responsibility, and they also have the responsibility to put in the checks and balances needed to make sure the system is fit for purpose.
Q250 Anthony Mangnall: Can I draw you back to Jo Hamilton’s comments about the chronology of payments? We can talk about the compensation schemes, but it is important to ensure we are getting it right so that the systems are addressed for those who have been waiting the longest. Given what you have heard this morning, how can you go back and help speed up the process and deal with the bureaucracy? Mr Read said what he is going to do. What can you do from your position to speed up the timelines?
Kevin Hollinrake: I might hand over to Carl here, because we are looking after the DBT and he looks after the GLO scheme. We made commitments about turnaround and responses to claims that have been submitted. We are very keen to do that, and we have the 40 working days rule in 90% of cases. We are determined to slim down the bureaucracy. We are working with the advisory board, and they are making recommendations about how we can expedite payments, which we are keen to do. We have implemented some things already, not least the fixed-sum award across the two schemes. Carl, you may want to comment on that.
Carl Creswell: I certainly think the £75k fixed-sum offer should help us with maybe up to a third of the claimants within the GLO cohort, looking at the data we have received so far. We definitely have a strong record from the impact of the £600,000 fixed-sum offer for the overturned convictions, so I hope that will help.
I want to put on the record the fact that we have had 59 claims into the Department within the cohort that you mentioned earlier—the 478 claimants—so we aren’t sitting there with a large number of unprocessed claims. We designed this process trying to learn lessons from some of the criticisms of the Horizon shortfall scheme by working closely with claimants’ lawyers. We employed Freeths to help us design this scheme, and we included within that design steps such as the request for medical advice, forensic accountancy advice and so on from experts. We are delivering a scheme, having consulted the claimants’ lawyers, that works within that process. I totally recognise that we need to go further and faster, but so far we have had 59 claims in and we have given out 44 offers, of which 29 have been accepted. There is much more to do and a lot of claims to come, but it is not as though they are sitting on our desk unprocessed.
Q251 Anthony Mangnall: I understand the need to consult lawyers to make sure the system works, but I have never found a lawyer doing anything quickly in my life. This is slightly the problem. Apologies—I don’t mean to be rude about previous witnesses, especially given the good work you are doing.
Can you possibly provide timelines on this? I don’t think you are hitting the 40-day target and delivering the compensation that people are asking for in the times that you are suggesting. Is it possible for you to provide this Committee with that evidence so we can scrutinise and publish it?
Carl Creswell: Could I quickly come back on that? Following the previous hearing—we came and gave evidence a while ago—we have been writing on a quarterly basis to the Chair of the Committee to provide data across all the compensation schemes. Following your recommendations, we have gone further and are now publishing that data on a monthly basis. The most recent report was issued yesterday, and it included the statistics that I have just given you. We are happy to provide further information on top of that, and next month we will assess whether we are delivering against the 90% target for 40 working days, which is quite a stretching target. We are happy to give you an update on that particular statistic.
Q252 Chair: The key thing is that the target has to take aim at cheque-out-the-door.
Carl Creswell: Yes.
Kevin Hollinrake: Absolutely. Can I just make the point that all the schemes are very slow at the start? That is just the way these schemes are, because it takes a while to start filling the pipeline and for that to come through. If you look at HSS, 85% of claimants have full and final settlements, so offers have been made to the ones who applied in the original timescale. It is not as if people are sitting around doing nothing. The people on the independent panel for HSS include people like Lord Garnier, eminent KCs and six forensic accountants.
Q253 Chair: I was a Minister long enough to know that very often words like “processing” and “settlement offered” are used. There are all kinds of words that we can invent to give a summary of a stage of the process.
Kevin Hollinrake: Money in the bank.
Chair: The key thing that we need is the target for when the cheque is out of the door. That is what we have to measure against.
Kevin Hollinrake: If you look at the 31 overturned convictions, 29 of the cheques are in the bank of the intended recipient.
Chair: So we will now use the cheque-in-the-bank target as a way of judging—
Q254 Anthony Mangnall: Do you mind if I ask two final questions? Minister, who should pick up the bill for this—Fujitsu or the taxpayer? That might have an obvious answer. Secondly, Fujitsu, as you have heard in this morning’s session, feel there is a moral obligation. They feel that they may offer some money in the future. Are we then opening up another scheme? And how will that scheme work to make sure that the compensation reaches all of the people who have been impacted and is successfully processed by August this year?
Kevin Hollinrake: We are not opening a new scheme.
Q255 Anthony Mangnall: What do you do with the compensation?
Kevin Hollinrake: That money should go back to the taxpayer for what the taxpayer has had to fund. Is it £1 billion? It is not being funded by the Post Office. That is why it does not sit on their accounts, because the taxpayer is picking up the tab. So any contribution from Fujitsu—I welcome the commitment made today and the conversation we had previously between officials. We think it is a timing thing in terms of maximising the contribution to the taxpayer when we have that proper discussion about a contribution to the bill. It is a very significant bill. It might end up north of £1 billion. Our suspicion is that it will. That is a very significant contribution that the taxpayer is making, and it is very welcome. We should thank the taxpayer for doing that. But also we should expect people who have contributed to the scandal to contribute financially.
Q256 Ian Lavery: Minister, do you think there was ever a perception that the inward investment from Fujitsu, from Japan, was so great that the Government took a back seat and did not want to interfere with this at the beginning for fear of losing inward investment? Secondly—you can correct me if I am wrong—I understand that the Government always had at least one person on the board of the Post Office all the way through. Did that Government nominee not come forward with any information with regard to what was happening at any stage during that whole period?
Kevin Hollinrake: Listen: we welcome anybody who invests in this country as long as they are a bona fide actor. Has that influenced any decision I have made or any conversation I have had with any of my colleagues or the Secretary of State in terms of how we go about getting Fujitsu to contribute, for example? Never. That has never been a factor, and never would it be. So, no. We purely think that, for the 15 months that I have been in my role, it is a timing thing. We want to establish exactly who is guilty and the extent of their contribution to the scandal, and then make sure that the contribution is commensurate with the contribution they made to the scandal in the first place.
In terms of who knew what and the Government nominee on the board, we have a representative from UKGI who sits on the board currently. I do not know about that relationship in the past. I do not know what the relevant Government person knew or did not know. I don’t know if Carl can add any information to that. But I do think it is right that we do not try and duplicate what the inquiry is doing. It is a very complex set of circumstances. It should be given time to report. It should complete at the end of this year and hopefully report soon after. Then we will know who knew what, or should have known what and should have done what. We can then assign blame accordingly.
Carl Creswell: I agree with that analysis. I do not think that it is factually correct that there was a Government representative throughout that period from 1999 through to now. I think at one point the Post Office was part of Royal Mail Group and I do not believe there was a Government representative on the board of Royal Mail. I could not tell you factually when that changed and when the shareholder executive first put someone on the board that oversaw the work of the Post Office. That is the factual distinction that I would make.
Q257 Antony Higginbotham: Minister, you have heard all the previous evidence. You will have heard Nick Read talk about the final compensation bill and he did not think that £1 billion was accurate. You just said it will probably be “north of £1 billion”. How are your figures so different?
Kevin Hollinrake: I know the facts. I cannot speak for Nick Read. This is something where we are picking the tab up, so we are probably taking a closer look at it. It is a maximum figure, that billion quid currently specified. Clearly, with the taxpayer picking up the tab of this, we have got to calculate what we think the impact will be. That figure at the moment is set at a maximum of £1 billion. What we did last week in terms of the overturning of the convictions will have a massively material effect on that, because it opens the door for compensation—for a significant increase in the number of people who will come forward and have access to compensation. I had an email, I think it was just yesterday or the day before, from somebody saying that they have overturned their convictions already, they were never intending to enter this process and by our doing what we have done, in terms of the fixed-sum award, for example, they are now entering the process. So it will happen very quickly. A combination of the fixed-sum award and the mass overturning of the convictions will have a significant impact on the number of people who receive compensation, and quite rightly too.
Q258 Antony Higginbotham: Do you think that there is a naivety, a lack of curiosity, in the Post Office management about the compensation bill?
Carl Creswell: Could I come in on the factual point around what Mr Read said? He was referring to what was included in the accounts that were published at the end of last year, which preceded the announcement last week. So the assessment that was done at that point was on the basis of the low number of people that had come forward. This is what has driven the policy change that we have been discussing with the Minister since before Christmas, which led to the announcement last week.
Kevin Hollinrake: It does not impact on the Post Office accounts—it is as simple as that. It is a taxpayers’—
Q259 Antony Higginbotham: But does that result in a lack of curiosity on the part of the Post Office management? They do not need to be concerned with it.
Kevin Hollinrake: It is probably not a question for me. To me, it is not relevant in terms of the main issue here, which is accelerating compensation; it makes no difference, in terms of getting compensation out of the door, whether they are curious or not. It is incumbent on all of us involved in this process to try and accelerate every part of the process.
What I did welcome from Nick Read was his commitment to look again at the process and streamline it, because there was some very concerning evidence from Neil Hudgell about some of the complexities and some of the delays in responses—that should not happen. There should be enough resources there to respond quickly to any simple query, simple question, to try to resolve these matters as quickly as possible. So I certainly welcome that.
Q260 Antony Higginbotham: I accept your point that this does not impact the compensation, but does it not talk to the culture in the Post Office that sub-postmasters are still dealing with that same organisation that is not interested in the final provision and that is not curious? You heard the questions and the answers throughout the morning.
Kevin Hollinrake: It may do. I do not feel that that is the thing that is holding back people getting access to compensation. Bureaucracy, red tape—whatever you want to call it—is an inevitable fact of life in our lives. We want to minimise it wherever possible. Where we can cut that red tape and make it easier to get access to compensation, we will do everything we can to do that.
Q261 Chair: Thank you very much. I just have a couple of questions to wrap up.
You will have heard Jo Hamilton referring to the £75,000 up-front payment to settle cases as being “out of touch” and saying that it would not even cover the interest on what has been stolen from them by Post Office Ltd. What is your response to that?
Kevin Hollinrake: It depends on the level of your claim. In someone like Jo Hamilton’s case, clearly that would be the case, but that is not what the fixed-sum award is all about. It is saying to people with lower-value claims, “If you’ve got a claim potentially for £10,000, as somebody may have, £75,000 is quite a lot of money for you.” It will take them out of the queue, because all those people have to go through a process of compiling and then submitting a claim, which is then responded to. All those people can come out of the queue. Alan’s question earlier was, “What will happen to people who have already accepted £30,000, for example?” They will all get topped up to £75,000. So in the GLO the minimum you will get is £75,000. It takes lots of people out of the queue who would have been accessing lower-level claims. It does not help people like Jo Hamilton—only to the extent that there are fewer people then who are accessing the full assessment process, which is better.
Q262 Chair: So you would accept that in cases like Jo Hamilton’s the process has been much too slow to date and does now need speeding up?
Kevin Hollinrake: Absolutely.
Q263 Chair: Let me just check a couple of the recommendations that we have made as a Committee with you, because we have been working on this for some time. In 2022 we obviously demanded that the Government ensure that the 555 were compensated fully on the same basis as other victims. The GLO scheme was set up, and you have been able to give the Committee this afternoon a goal of settling those claims by the end of August. Is that correct?
Kevin Hollinrake: 7 August, I think I said, but you are right. Of your 18 recommendations, I think we implemented 12, and we implemented others in different ways. Indeed, in July I stood up in Parliament myself as a Back Bencher and called for the same thing as you called for—
Q264 Chair: We are going to go through them. The second recommendation we made was that the Government urgently put in place “an independent intermediary body” to support victims of the Horizon scandal in seeking redress. That was rejected by the Government, and today we have heard evidence that there may be hundreds more victims out there who have not had the confidence to come forward. We have also heard the chief executive of the Post Office say that he agrees that the guidance for the HSS will need some revision. Do you think Government were wrong to reject that recommendation of the Committee last year?
Kevin Hollinrake: No. The CCRC plays that role as an independent body, of course, and people can go to it. The CCRC itself wrote to all those with convictions and asked them to come forward. Citizens Advice was also available to people.
Q265 Chair: Have you ever tried to get hold of Citizens Advice? There is no Citizens Advice left in this country.
Kevin Hollinrake: That is one for a different inquiry, perhaps. But I think the biggest issue we have—I don’t think the Committee did recommend what we did last week, which was unprecedented. We looked at all this, and to do this quickly we looked at expediting the process within the CCRC, at different ways in which we could do that and at increasing resources. Everything that we looked at would have taken years to deliver, so we came down on the very significant and unprecedented step of taking a mass overturning of convictions route.
Q266 Chair: We also recommended that Government set stretching targets to address the backlog. Paul Scully, the hon. Member for Sutton and Cheam, set out an ambition of 100% of initial offers under the historic shortfall scheme to be made by the end of 2022, and the Post Office chief exec committed to making initial compensation offers to about 95% of claimants by the end of 2022. Those targets have been missed.
Kevin Hollinrake: And I apologise for our missing them. There is no shortage of appetite or willingness to do it. These things take longer than we expect. I have seen every compensation scheme that I have ever worked with as a Back Bencher, and it is no different with this one as a Minister. It is probably more complex than we initially anticipated, but is there ambition to get that money out of the door as quickly as possible? That is our No. 1 priority. Is our ambition to make sure that it is fair, and seen to be fair? That is our No. 2 priority, and that is what the advisory board is there for. Is it our priority to make sure that people are held to account for what has gone wrong? Absolutely, and that is what the inquiry is there for.
Chair: You have told the Committee today that you thought the progress in making payments and redress was much too slow, and that you will bring forward a Bill to try to speed it up. You will look at whether that will be a draft Bill, so that it can go through pre-legislative scrutiny, and you have been really clear with the Committee that your goal for cheques in the bank is around August time. Thank you very much indeed for your evidence today, both of you, and thank you very much for your patience with our overrunning sitting today.